"Candy Japan" delivering Japanese sweets to the world took over 1.5 million yen and found out YouTube advertisement

We operate a business that sells sweets sold at Japanese shops and ships to customers all over the worldCandy JapanSteadily from the establishment in 2011Increase sales and profitsIt is said that it is coming. Such Candy Japan will conduct advertisement distribution on YouTube aiming for further growth. The series of flow and results are published on the blog.

What I Learned Burning $ 13,867 on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/what-i-learned-advertising-on-youtube

As Japanese people look at sweets lined with foreign supermarkets and think that it is "wow", sweets sold in Japan for foreigners seems to be very interesting to see . Bemmu Sepponen from Finland who got an eye to such a place launched in 2011 a service to ship sweets sold in Japan and send it to customers all over the world twice a month.


The service gradually expands to become profitable in 2012, and in 2014 monthly revenue grows to more than 1 million yen. All of the footprints since the start-upOfficial blogIt is published in, but in 2015Discovered that an illegal card use occurredOr, in 2016Bothering with the yen's appreciationStruggling continues, such as 2017Year of hardshipIt was revealed that it was.

Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/2017-year-in-review


◆ Production of animated advertisements
Candy Japan said that they wanted to expand users by advertising on YouTube. The company is a service targeting people living outside Japan, advertisements using the Internet can be appealed to all over the world, and it is possible to increase efficiency by delivering targeted advertisements.

So Candy Japan started out by creating video for advertisement. There are three major types of images used in advertisements: "Screencast" type that captures applications such as screens, real-life type that explains products using actual people and landscape, CG, etc., and animation type . Candy Japan decided to produce animated advertisement videos because there are many people who like animation for users using the company's services.


The problem of production cost is inevitable in actually making out the production. Generally, when making animation, the production cost is about "about 100 dollars to 150 dollars (about 10,000 yen to 16,000 yen)" per second, and Candy Japan assumed the 30-second advertisement The cost will be in the range of $ 3,000 to $ 4,500 (about 320,000 to 480,000 yen). Candy Japan, who was considering whom to make the production, started producing the image by placing an order with an artist who is in charge of illustrations of the site, rather than an animation production company.

I thought about the concept and structure of the image, the timeline, and thought about the dialogue by myself, I made a video and, as a result, I got 3000 dollars (about 320,000 yen) as the cost of video production, 100 narration fee The dollar (about 10,000 yen) took it. This movie is made in this way.

What is Candy Japan? - YouTube


◆ Make your ads visible on YouTube
Once animation ad creation is completed, we will upload the video to YouTube and prepare to use it as an advertisement. You can set up ads by setting up ad campaigns on Google's ad platform "AdWords" and specifying YouTube ID there.


The cost of displaying ads on YouTube is basically the same as Google AdWords. The cost is determined by the auction type between advertisers, and more advertiser's advertisement that paid more (= higher bid) advertisement is displayed. The unit price is usually expressed in terms of the cost per thousand impressions "CPM" and the lowest price is $ 10 (about 1000 yen), but of course it will not be a highly effective advertisement. So at Candy Japan,About the same as when hitting CM on TVWe set a unit price for displaying advertisement on YouTube so that we can check its effectiveness. In addition, in the case of YouTube advertisements, if the viewer skips the advertisement halfway, the advertisement publication fee will not be collected accordingly. In the case of Candy Japan, it seems that 30% of the advertisement impressions actually showed 30 seconds of advertisement until the end.

The advantage of Internet advertisement is that "topics" and "PlacementBy setting up targeted "audience", "keywords", etc., it is possible to narrow down and display the opponents that the advertisement is likely to resonate. Candy Japan started advertisement video distribution on YouTube from the summer of 2017, with difficulty setting these settings.

◆ What is the final ad performance?
After the start of advertisement distribution, Candy Japan was optimized based on information obtained from AdWords etc. and was aiming for an efficient appeal, but as a result, this advertisement strategy ended in failure, It was not possible to collect sales exceeding that. Although there were many people who actually applied for service by actually seeing advertisement, even if taking long-term influence into account, it cost about 13,867 dollars (about 1.5 million It has reached the conclusion that it has not reached the number necessary to recover the cost of yen).

Candy Japan said that the advertisement campaign was terminated once and the idea of ​​the next campaign was being studied. Based on this experience Candy Japan said that since advertising on YouTube is not cheap at all, only when it is possible to prepare "goods with net income of at least several thousand yen by selling goods", Candy Japan's service Or a product with a flat-rate sales structure like a monthly application is not suitable for YouTube advertisement.

Also, even if you have products that seem to be suitable for advertisement, it is important to have enough physical strength (= financial margin) to change the advertising campaign according to the situation and watch the transition I will.